Recruitment Marketing includes different processes used for building and communicating organization's Employer Brand and Employee Value Proposition. The goal of every recruitment marketing strategy is to attract and hire top talent. Recruiters that already haven’t, should get familiar with Recruitment Marketing best practices.

Defining Recruitment Marketing

Recruitment Marketing is the process of nurturing and attracting talented individuals at every touch-point of their journey using marketing methods and tactics. It has emerged as an HR buzzword. However today, it is considered as a must-have recruiting strategy.

The main 4 goals of every recruitment marketing strategy are to

1. make potential candidates aware of your company and opened positions
2. trigger their interest into your company
3. make them consider you as their next employer of choice and
4. drive talent to apply to the open positions your company has available.

How did Recruitment Marketing emerge?

Recruitment Marketing has emerged as a consequence of the current situation in the HR industry. It is clear that the demand for talent has far exceeded its supply. This situation has resulted in “The War for Talent”. In this war, the biggest power has talent. Consequently, the way we recruit has changed dramatically. 

Talent has many options to choose from, and they do so the same way as they buy products and a services. They have access to a lot of information, and they do extensive research before they apply for jobs. For those reasons, advertising jobs and searching for candidates has become very similar to advertising products and searching for customers.

Can you see how the word “marketing” ended up next to recruiting?

Candidate journey has switched from application, selection and hire stage, to a much longer funnel that looks like this:

In the the first 3 stages, candidates search about firm’s reputation and employee value proposition. They look for various information about current employees, benefits, pay and benefits, company’s culture, career and growth opportunities, interesting projects and events.  

Modern recruiters, who see recruiting as marketing, know how to “market” themselves as employers and trigger candidates’ interests in the early stages of their candidate journey.

Elements of Recruitment Marketing

Some of the most common elements of recruitment marketing include:

Employer Branding

Employer branding has proven to have a big impact on company's ability to attract and hire talent. It is the process in which company’s culture, EVP and employer brand are constantly communicated to the potential candidates through different channels or touch-points. The goal of every employer branding strategy is to build a picture of a desirable employer of choice and attract talent. 

Here are some employer branding ideas that can bring your employer branding strategy to the next level. 

Inbound Recruiting

Inbound recruiting is a method in which companies, through useful and informative content attract and engage talent. Some forms of content may include company’s career blog, team blogging about interesting projects and many other.

Here are the stages of inbound recruiting. 

The goal of every inbound recruiting strategy should be to get as many leads as possible in order to build a high-quality talent pool. Leads are defined as candidates that have shown interest in your company by: subscribing to the career newsletter, joined talent community, attended talent networking event, visited career site, communicated with existing employees...

It is important to, through high quality content keep these leads warm and make them apply to your next open position.

Candidate Engagement

In order to keep qualified candidates or leads in your talent pool, you have to have an engagement strategy. Encourage candidates to subscribe to your career newsletter and start building relationships with them. Candidate engagement is considered one of the most important measurements of a successful recruiting strategy. 

Candidate Relationship Management

Similar to marketing email campaigns, recruiters have strated implementing recruiting email campaigns. The main purpose of this is building outstanding relationships with qualified candidates in your talent pool.

Set up email campaigns targeted to your candidates in hard-to-fill talent pools. Communicate your achievement, new job openings, career opportunities, team activities, or any other content that could attract your candidate persona.

Here's our guide on how to create a candidate persona.

Candidate Experience

Finding the right candidates is not easy. Once you manage to do that, it is important to keep them happy. Providing exceptional candidate experience throughout the recruiting, selection and hiring process is a must! Relevant and timely feedback, transparency and openness are just some of the elements of a positive candidate experience.

Data-driven Recruiting or HR Analytics

Recruiting has become data-driven.

Tracking things like website visitors, applicants, source of applicants, newsletter and event conversion rates, hire rates per source, qualified applicant per source, employee referral program performance, time, cost and quality of hire can all give you significant insights into your recruiting strategy. You will then be able to see what is working, and what needs improvement.

Not sure what should you measure? Here is our list of most important hiring metrics. 

Tools for implementing Recruitment Marketing strategy

Recruitment Marketing can be simplified by instituting recruitment marketing platforms, such as TalentLyft's Convert and Engage. Software like this allows you to build positive relationships with candidates.

Using recruitment marketing platforms recruiters can create different engaging campaigns that target people within specific talent pools. Using tools like this, recruiters can personalise, yet automate their communication and relationship building process with candidates. and share specific messages with candidates.

Most recruitment marketing platforms also offer career site templates that recruiters can use to design beautiful career sites that generate more job applicants. Also, they can do so without any experience in design or coding.

These are all solutions a recruitment marketing software offers. 

Why bother implementing a Recruitment Marketing strategy?

Recruitment marketing is a discipline that has been introduced as a consequence of the current situation in the labor market. Its main goal is to follow the latest trends in the market, and offer solutions to the companies that best overcome these new challenges.

Recruitment Marketing suggest different approach to recruiting because old methods are simply not working any more. Instead of posting jobs to job boards and waiting for applicants, companies should constantly be building their talent pools, engage with talent and approach at the right moment.

This approach is believed to:

• shorten time to hire
• lower cost to hire
• improve quality of hire and
• reduce turnover

Companies that first adopt these new recruiting best practices will be more likely to attract talent. As attracting talent has become the biggest HR challenge, in the near future I see all recruiters diving into the recruitment marketing discipline.

Looking for more recruitment marketing tips? Check out our list of most productive recruitment marketing strategies.